SAY AWARDS
PICK OF THE POPS
It’s Scottish Album of the Year Awards time – and once
again, we’ve assembled a crack panel of experts to discuss the longlist. Ahead lies plenty of disagreement, probing,
some rejoicing and a wee bit of dancing
OUR PANEL: David Pollock (freelance journalist), Kirstyn Smith (List music editor), Stewart Smith (freelance journalist) and Arusa Qureshi (List content producer)
Stewart: Firstly, I’m delighted that Sacred Paws and Ela Orleans have been nominated. They stand head and shoulders above the competition and if neither of them wins there is no justice. But overall, the longlist is disappointingly male, pale and stale. There was plenty of exciting and innovative new music on the eligible albums list – Helena Celle, Alasdair Roberts, Richard Youngs, Heather Leigh & Peter Brotzmann, Anxiety, Mark Vernon – but we’ve ended up with your indie da’s playlist.
Arusa: I agree with you Stewart, especially about the list being male, pale and stale. Where’s the hip hop, grime, DJs, producers etc.? And perhaps more importantly for me, I think (I may be wrong) that there’s only one person of colour on the list. When I see lists like this it coni rms for me how much the creative industries in Scotland are lacking in diversity. And for anyone that dares to use the age-old argument ‘well, there weren’t any decent people of colour this year’, it’s not their job to make themselves known, it’s ours to i nd them! And if there really aren’t enough people of colour in the Scottish music industry, isn’t that something that the Scottish Music Industry Association should be actively trying to combat? Fair enough that the public will vote for acts like
Frightened Rabbit because they are popular and there’s nothing wrong with that. But how do we ensure that lesser-known acts aren’t left out of the mix? If you’re an underground act and you take a look at the longlist from the past few years, you might think that you have no chance. But maybe there needs to be some effort going towards changing that mindset? Or if that’s not possible, maybe there needs to be a new category especially for those up- and-coming acts?
Kirstyn: Arusa’s point about a category specii cally for those up-and-coming artists is an interesting one: should there be two awards? One for up-and-comers and one for better known acts? It would be hard to categorise who counts as ‘up-and-comers’, but I’m thinking along the lines of the Edinburgh Comedy Awards at the Fringe. Stewart: I like the idea of an upcoming category. Perhaps even extend it so you’ve got a few different genre categories. Then you could pick an overall winner – although it’s important we don’t just have a repeat of the Grammys where BAME artists win best urban but lose out on the main prize. To be honest, I i nd awards a bit icky as a rule, but at least if you have different categories you shine the light on a wider range of acts and make it less winner-takes-all.
1 Jun–31 Aug 2017 THE LIST 41